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SmartTrade’s announcement yesterday makes it one of the first institutional trading system vendors to release a self-developed HTML5 front end (although TraderTools and Progress Apama had previously achieved something similar by partnering with Caplin).

As we’ve frequently noted in this blog, the world of trading GUIs is moving decisively to HTML5, for all except a few niche applications, and it’s good to see leading trading system providers acknowledge this. The SmartTrade GUI looks fairly basic at this stage, but no doubt it will evolve.

What’s a little surprising is SmartTrade’s statement that the new GUI is “tightly integrat[ed] with the full stack of the smartTrade Liquidity Management System”. One of the clearest requirements from banks working in this area is for a delivery platform that can connect to all their systems, across asset classes, and from pre-trade through to post-trade, withoutbeing tightly-coupled to any of them. The whole point of a modern single dealer platform is to provide the end-user with an integrated view across multiple silos, whatever the systems being used in each silo.

Given that this lack of tight coupling is typically right at the top of the shopping list of most firms moving to online trading, SmartTrade may need to re-think this approach at some point.